Data on witch beliefs in sixty socities (the HRAF Probability Sample Files) will be extracted from the Human Relations Area Files. The principal investigator and a second coder (unaware of the hypotheses under study) will code this data along several dimensions, including: sexual identity of witches, sexual identity of victims, incidence of accusations, etc. Once coded, the data will be correlated with already existing coded data on 1) the social structure of the societies; 2) female participation in subsistence activity; 3) female rights in the political and economic domains; 4) separation of the domestic and public domains. The primary purpose of the project is to test the null hypothesis that the position of females in the social and economic structure of society is unrelated to the cultural system of witch beliefs in a society. This hypothesis is of significance in the explanation of the forms witch beliefs take under different social systems. Further, the results will have implications for the cross-cultural study of sex roles and sex stereotyping. Finally, when the codes on witch beliefs in the sixty societies are published, other researchers can utilize them in correlational studies involving other variables (e.g., child training practices, sexual attitudes and behavior, etc.).